CONSENT – four questions from GOTN

She’s nearly naked, just a few square inches of a sheer swimsuit fails miserably to conceal her beautiful body. Her wrists are in cuffs, stretched upwards and tied to the wooden beam of my Airbnb cottage in the grounds of a large manor house. I happen to know no-one is there. We are completely alone. She is blindfolded and has been since before she entered the building, leaving her no sense of where she is.

I have just landed a flogger across her bare breast.

Is this not the perfect setting for a bit of musing on consent?

I promise we’ll come back to Lilly but we can leave her there, hanging from the beam for a few moments. The waiting might highten the nervous tension I already sense in her body.

The wonderful Girl On The Net recently posted a detailed exploration of consent in BDSM in which she argues, in her usual powerful, lucid style that, rather than focus on a list of acts that should or should not be permitted, we should focus on consent. In one situation a light pat on the bottom is an assault; in another a brutal, cutting strike with a whip is a consensual act.

She sets a high bar in her definition of consent, requiring a tick alongside each of these four questions:

Does the person you’re doing this with/to actively want you to do it?

Do you have a power imbalance in your relationship (i.e. one is the other’s boss) that might make it difficult for the other one to say ‘no’?

Do they have an easy way to withdraw from the situation if they feel uncomfortable?

Are you confident that you can and will stop at any time when they give the signal? And do you know what their signals are?

I’ve thought a lot about this list, not least because I read it the morning after the session I started to describe above, a session with a relatively inexperienced submissive who had given me her trust, allowing me to blindfold and immobilise her in a very isolated situation. We went deep down the rabbit hole together.

So, lets go back to Lilly. We’ll leave her hanging for a bit, but I’ll whisper in her ear to ask if she’s still OK with the strain placed on her shoulders by the way she’s tied.

I’ve just whipped her breast; hard enough to make her flinch but not hard enough to cause panic or alarm. As an act, this would seem extreme to many, a candidate for a list of “banned” acts perhaps. But does it pass the consent test?

Did she actively want me to do this: There was no detailed list of what I was/wasn’t going to do in the session so perhaps it was a risk, but we have done this before and with the same flogger. I know Lilly is OK with it so long as I land the flogger lightly. It’s not just tolerance either, Lilly actively wants me to help her explore these things in our sessions and trusts me to do so safely and to take care of her.

Is there a power imbalance that would make it difficult for her to say no? Interesting one this. I am the client and she is a sex worker, one with only just over a year’s experience. Does she yet understand that the power in this situation is with her, or might the desire to please her paying client lead her into a ‘forced consent’ to an action she might prefer to avoid? Only Lilly could answer this, but I hope she feels secure enough in our relationship to know I would think no less of her if she just said no at any point.

Does she have an easy way to withdraw? I’ve reminded her at the start of the session that she just needs to say “RED” or “STOP” and I will immediately do so. The rope tying her to the beam will feel thick and strong but some safety scissors are where I can reach them and I tested them before she arrived.

Could I stop if she wanted me to? Yes. I’ve asked myself that a lot, especially since I heard Lyra’s story about a dominant who couldn’t stop and didn’t want to, and I’m happy with the answer. Yes, there is a part of me that derives a  measure of sadistic excitement from her responses to the extreme sensations I am causing, but that is, I believe, a very small part of why I am here. It is not what drives me in these sessions.

And so, comfortable that I am operating within the bounds of Lilly’s consent I aim the flogger, very carefully, at her other breast.

I was also comfortable that her consent extended to the even more challenging scene that followed, a scene that was quite demanding but which was set up in a way that required her consent to be reasserted constantly.

And I most definitely had her consent for the sex that came afterwards and the crying, shaking release of the intense orgasm that Lilly experienced at the end of it.

So, we’re all good here right? I can report back to Girl On The Net that I passed her exam and that, even though we were playing hard games at the edge of Lilly’s endurance, I held her consent, as defined by the four questions, at all times.

No, I’m afraid I can’t quite do that.

We agreed, as we lay together, slowly coming down from what had been an intense experience for both of us, that Lilly would stay an extra hour. I just wasn’t ready to lose her yet. Towards the end of that time, I proposed giving her a short, firm spanking to finish our evening off. She hesitated; not much, but that little hesitation should have been enough, for me to immediately back off.

But I didn’t. I came at it from a different angle, looking for a yes, and got one. Dammit, her bottom is completely perfect and I wanted to spank it again. And I did. Lilly was fine with it, and we kissed a lot before she left.

But reading GOTN’s article the following morning I realised, to a measure of self-disgust, that I’d ultimately failed her exam. I’d done well on the hard parts; the flogging, and the other serious BDSM scenes we played. I’d come unstuck on the easiest question in the paper; a simple over-the-knee spanking at the end of the session.

Because, as GOTN lays out very clearly: it’s not about the act.

It’s never about the act.

It’s about consent.

 

I apologised to Lilly in a message after I’d read the GOTN post and I do so again now. As we go deeper down the rabbit hole together, the four questions above are how consent must always be judged in our sessions.

I feel that the amount of time I have spent at the very edge of my own limits with Elita makes it possible for me to take others to that same place with care and understanding. The trust involved in doing so is a truly beautiful thing that is, I am sure, both hard won and easily lost.

 

A measure of how intense this evening in our little Airbnb cottage was is the fact that I didn’t get any photographs!